Alexander Payne’s new film Nebraska starts as a road movie, with a father and son going from Billings to Lincoln. The kind and directionless David (Will Forte) has decided to indulge his father Woody (Bruce Dern), who is struggling with dementia and thinks that he can pick up his $1 million in winnings from a magazine distributor in Lincoln.
But circumstances force Woody and David to stop in Hawthorne, Nebraska for an unplanned and strained reunion with old friends and family.
With just over 1,000 residents and its better days long gone, Hawthorne seems symbolic here not just of other struggling towns in the American West but also of a more complex economic, moral, and cultural decline.
As we watch Woody face the scattered remnants of his own past and struggle to make sense of the present, we are forced to consider our own families, our own pasts, our own choices.
Or at least that’s how I felt. I suspect the tragedy — and the occasional comedy — of the Grant family will elicit wildly different emotions from those who see it.
Bruce Dern so fully inhabits the character of Woody that I could barely take my eyes away from him. Early on, Woody seemed at times a bit too aware to be wandering confusedly by the roadside, but dementia obviously takes many forms and I was soon swept away by the performance.
Dern won the best actor prize at Cannes earlier this year, and it’s easy to see why. He’s so good here that he threatens to overshadow the fine work of Forte, who is utterly convincing as the unambitious David.
In one especially fine scene early on, David’s former live-in girlfriend has stopped by with some bags. He thinks at first that she is moving back in, but she’s just dropping stuff off. The couple’s entire relationship is suggested with a few sparse snatches of dialogue and a few tired expressions.
Again and again, Payne wrings meaning and emotion from similarly simple moments in Bob Nelson’s sparse, disciplined script.
Woody’s acerbic wife Kate (June Squibb) has hit a point in life where she sees no need to hold back about anything — her disgust with her sometimes drunken and somewhat demented husband, her frustration with her sons’ softness, her harsh judgments about friends and family with whom she grew up, her own sexual allure decades ago.
Sqibb fires off one liner after one liner, and at times her cynical humor seems about to overwhelm the story’s deeper elements.
But then Kate is reeled back in, and she even manages a few moments of true nobility as she defends Woody and reaches out to him in quiet ways.
In its pretty dark portrait of life in Hawthorne and implicitly of life in the West, the film occasionally settles for caricature — like in a few of the scenes with David’s creepy cousins.
In another sad moment that elicited some uncomfortable laughter at the screening on opening night of the Savannah Film Festival, Woody and the other men of the Grant family are glued to a television, barely talking amongst themselves. But at points like this when the story could have devolved into mockery, Nebraska quickly finds its emotional footing, like in a brilliant scene when David talks to one of Woody’s old girlfriends, a woman he didn’t even know existed — a woman who remembers Woody at his best.
Like Woody, David, Kate, and their other son Ross (Bob Odenkirk), we are moving through life in the shadow of lives we could have lived — and in the shadow of lives that others around us could have lived.
Nebraska is shot in black and white. For obvious reasons, the technique reminded me of The Last Picture Show, and it’s worth noting that the desaturation placed particular emphasis on the composition of individual shots, which returned routinely to balanced, geometric images.
The camera becomes a raw, unflinching, honest observer of the unfolding tragedy. The medium all but disappears.
There were several obvious ways for director Payne and writer Nelson to close this film. Fortunately, they didn’t choose any of those cheap options.
The final moments of Nebraska are both stirring and restrained, with father and son looking back even as we know that much harder choices are coming.